The witchs son, p.1
The Witch's Son, page 1
The Witch’s Son
By Cheryl Potter
© Cheryl Potter 1997
First published in Great Britain 1997
by Robert Hale London
The right of Cheryl Potter to be identified as
Author of this work has been asserted by her
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
London 1666
On a hilltop overlooking the burning metropolis Kate paused to rest. She sat on a small bundle of belongings, pulled the strings of her chemise and put the child to her breast.
As the toothless palate found its goal she stroked the downy head and quietly hummed a tune remembered of her mother. And her quiet mind drifted back to an August night on a hillside far away, with Jack by her side.
‘You came to me there, François,’ she murmured, smiling as she imagined fields dotted with stooks of oats and a scattering of black-eyed poppies. Time to feed up the ewes, ready for tupping. She laughed softly at her own foolish hankering.
She had willed the sun to set on the old life. Had chosen the evening. She pressed her lips against the gently pulsing fontanelle and whispered, ‘Just you and me now, François.’
And turned her face up to greet the dawn ....
The Witch
LUNA
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the Sun & Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
William Blake (1757-1827)
The Apothecary
St Martin’s Lane, London 1683
The end was near Kate knew. She felt the guttering vitality of the man; she saw it in his eyes. For the hours it had taken to deliver the cabinet-maker’s wife of twins, to oversee the coming of two new lives, the foreboding had lifted, but the quietening plod of the mare and the blithe chatter of the boy leading her back through the streets from his master’s house in Clerkenwell had given it space again.
John Jeakes, her husband, was dying.
The customers, the patrons who relied on the services of the apothecary-physician, saw nothing of his decline. They could not know how he clung to his work; how he conserved himself for the daily round of consultations, the making of preparations in the back-room laboratory, the instruction of the apprentices. They would never know his quiet courage; all day long easing, attempting to cure, denying himself the opiates which he made up for their pain.
But she knew.
The end was near and she had only just begun to know the measure of the man she had married sixteen years before, to love him as he deserved.
‘Mr Jeakes?’ a quizzical lift in the voice of the lad leading the horse cut across her thoughts. ‘S’cuse, ma’am, but you’re home, see!’ She saw his grin, his gesture towards the three-storey brick building, watched him dart round and link his fingers ready for her foot. Smiling, she dismounted and produced a coin from her purse.
The lad rubbed the money between his fingers with a chuckle. ‘There’ll be high jinks tonight what with the master making a holiday of tomorrow. Twin boys, now there’s a pretty thing!’ He sprang into the saddle and swung the mare round. ‘You can come again, Midwife Jeakes, and welcome!’
‘Sauce-box!’ Kate laughed, but as he jogged away she turned and stared at the inscription on the porch lintel with a heavy heart. John Jeakes & Son, Apothecary.
John had done more for François than many a natural father. With patience and love he had cultivated in the boy such a passion for study that at the precocious age of eleven years François had been admitted as apprentice by the London Company of Apothecaries. The business John had built up since their marriage, the striving and toiling had been with François in mind. Much as he treasured their ten-year-old daughter Anna, as he would have loved the natural son who had died in her womb, François had always had a special place in his affections. It seemed cruel that after so much loving endeavour he would not live to see François, at seventeen within a year of receiving his indentures, qualified and with sufficient experience to take over the business. It was cruel too, that he would not see Anna bloom into womanhood.
Too soon, she had prayed, who rarely turned to God. Too soon for Anna, for herself and for François.
Sixteen years before, the sacrifice of independence had seemed such a precarious step; giving up the life she had made with Cassy, turning her back on a generous and ever more élite clientele. The idea of marriage had been unexpected, unwelcome even. But even then that instinct she had long ago learnt to trust had told her that John was to be her future.
Untying her bonnet, she pushed the partially open door and went into the hall. A man in the blue livery of the Herries family was leaning against the wainscotting, idly tapping his gloves against his thigh. He straightened up at the sight of her.
‘Ah, Mrs Jeakes. I have knocked but it seems the apothecary is too busy to respond. Please, would you inform your husband that Lady Eugenie requests his attendance as a matter of urgency. She has sent the carriage.’
Kate frowned. It was unusual for all three doors leading off the hall to be shut. ‘No one has been out to you?’ she asked, opening the door to the dispensing room. Finding it empty, she went through the kitchen.
Joseph, the youngest of the apprentices, was leaning on a besom in the doorway to the preparation room watching Ursula, the kitchen girl, make bread. On any other occasion she would have been amused by the boy’s flushed start, by his guilty flurry. Urgency though, made her sharp.
Mr François had returned from his lecture to find the master in a rigor, had taken his father upstairs and sent for Mr Anton to finish the day’s surgery.
Doubling back to the hall, Kate brushed past the Herries’ servant and flew up the staircase. On the first-floor landing she dropped her cloak on the banister rail and quietly entered a large back room.
The room was blinkered, all but narrow columns of the afternoon light shuttered out. François was sitting by the bed, holding one of John’s hands between his. He had been talking as she came in, relaying with his usual fervour the content of the lecture he had attended at the Chelsea Physic Garden that morning. He paused for the moment it took to meet her eyes – to establish their oneness in concern for the man in the bed – then went on, ‘It is as though the lack of university training has allowed his ideas to flourish, Father. His experiments with barometers and the statistical hygroscope may one day give us the link between meteorology and disease.’
‘You spoke to Robert Boyle himself?’ John’s slurred voice barely reached Kate. She closed the door behind her and went to the foot of the bed. The large bed seemed somehow to diminish the stature of the man she had married. He lay awkwardly as if he had not even the strength to shift to a comfortable position. His head was turned towards François, heavy eyes clinging to his son’s lips. And though he was not yet fifty years old, and until just days before he had kept up the daily round with his old vigour, suddenly he seemed old and spent.
‘I did, Father. Can you believe the great man singled me out because of a question I put to him during the course of the lecture?’
A smile flickered across the sick face. ‘Audacious as ever.’
In the readiness of François’ own smile, in the way he now avoided her eyes, Kate knew the depth of his uncertainty. Tears of desperation were not far away.
‘Better still, Father, we have both been invited to see Mr Boyle’s laboratories in Maiden Lane‒’
‘Laboratories‒’ the sick man drawled absently.
Breathing heavily, François pressed his forehead against his father’s.
‘Rest now,’ he whispered thickly. ‘When you are well enough we will visit Maiden Lane together.’ Closing his eyes he kissed the clammy cheek, then placed his father’s hand on the woven bedcover and rose to stand alongside Kate.
‘Father was barely conscious when I found him on the dispensary floor,’ he breathed, ‘shivering feverishly and bleeding badly from a cut in his thigh. He broke a flask as he fell. I’ve stitched the cut and the rigor seems to have passed but his pulse is still very weak. I wanted to fetch Anton up from the surgery but Father made me swear to tend him myself.’
Kate leaned forward and began to knead the sick man’s feet through the bedcovers. ‘You know that John is very ill, don’t you François.’
‘I think I have known it for days now’ – his brown eyes searched her face – ‘and so have you.’
Kate brushed a lock of dark hair from his brow, wishing that she could as easily have brushed away the worry from his eyes. ‘Lady Eugenie has sent for John; her man is waiting downstairs. Go in his stead, François, do it for him.’
‘Shall I ride out to Highgate to fetch Anna afterwards?’
Kate shook her head. ‘There will be time enough for that in the morning; leave Anna with her Aunt Sophie for one night more. Go tend Lady Herries. And François, tell the others not to disturb us tonight.’
‘Kate?’ gasped the man in the bed. ‘Is that you, Kate?’
She watched François return to the bedside. As he pressed his cheek against his father’s hand, his shoulder-length hair fell over his face and she knew that he was crying. And though she pitied his anguish she felt too grateful for her son’s untarnished sensitivity, for the utter contrast between the nature of this François and that of the one who had given him life, to have it any other way.
‘Mother is here now,’ he was saying, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Th
François rose stiffly. He embraced his mother in silence then reluctantly left the room.
‘Kate?’
She knelt at the bedside and laid her head on her husband’s chest.
‘I’m here, John, I’m here.’ His fingers touched her head. She felt the deathly coldness of them through her hair. She lifted her head and smiled into his grey eyes. ‘You have come a long way, John Jeakes, since that day in Moorfields.’ As she spoke, a faint light came into his face, spots of pink livened his cheeks.
‘Could not have done it without you,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Did not think you would have me.’
Her smile broadened as if to smother the idea. But it was close to the truth. Had it not been for François she would probably not have married the modest apothecary. They had met through the Fat Saddler, one of her earliest clients on setting up in London with her friend Cassy. John was then a widower in his early thirties; he had recently lost both wife and child to the plague; a bookish, retiring man in need of the sexual relief that had become her business – grateful, considerate but no more so than many of the others then paying for the use of her artful body.
Then, one spring afternoon, John came to her as she sat beneath a tree in Moorfields, baby François crawling through the grass beside her. Dandling her son on his knees, he laid before her the ideas he had for expanding his practice and out of the blue asked her to become his wife.
It had taken her one day to decide. Guided by a potent inner sense, she had defied Cassy’s advice, and her own misgivings, to marry John Jeakes. She had taken John then for François’ sake, now though, she would gladly keep him for her own.
‘I am only glad you did marry me,’ he said. ‘And was cabinet-maker Martin’s wife safely delivered?’
‘She was, twin boys and much ado.’
‘Ah Kate. Kate, I am so tired.’ His body tensed beneath her. ‘Too much pain ... have to let go soon. Forgive me, I can not endure much more‒’
She kissed his eyes, his nose, his mouth. ‘Shall I get Anton to bring something to help you sleep?’
‘No,’ he gulped. ‘Come to me Kate, don’t go. Please don’t leave me now.’
She eased herself out of his grip and stood back. His eyes clung to her as she loosened the ties of her bodice and skirt, as she pulled the gown from her shoulders and pushed it and her underskirts over her hips. His hand reached out to touch the breasts which swung towards him as she bent to slide off hose and shoes.
A sigh shuddered through him as he murmured, ‘Still so beautiful‒’
She took his hand and rubbed it against each breast in turn, then cupped it between her legs.
‘Take away the cold, Kate, please take away the cold‒’
She climbed over the shivering man and slid under the covers. Working her arm under his neck, she drew her right leg gently over him and stroked his hair with her free hand. He seemed for a moment to be drifting into sleep then, as though pricked, he started awake again.
Kate whispered, ‘Where is the pain, John?’
He found her hand and drew it down to the parting of his ribs, flinching as he found the mark. ‘In God’s hands now ... the business‒’
‘Will be taken care of – rest easy John, I am strong you know that.’
‘Forgive me....’ his voice tailed off. And gradually the labour of his breathing lessened until, at last, he found sleep.
Cocooned in her limbs, he lingered through the long night. Through the shifting layers of her own consciousness Kate hung on to his breathing. Though the voices came to her, though memories and ghosts tormented her, she listened to his every breath. And when, with the lightening of the shaft at the half-shuttered window, the end finally came, she nuzzled her head into his shoulder and slept.
Lady Eugenie Herries had tired of the view from her chamber window; the Pall Mall traffic, even the comings and goings from the home of her near neighbour, Madame Nell Gwyn, had lost their appeal in the presence of the young apothecary.
Turning her head aside, she stared into a cheval-glass and found satisfaction in the simple elegance of her own appearance; in the gentle swell of her stomach under the madonna-blue top coat, in her unblemished complexion and shining brown hair. The purity of the image reminded her of the work of a Dutch artist she had admired in the Whitehall gallery. She smiled inwardly. The gentle ministrations of the younger Jeakes had done much to restore her equanimity and after her accident in St James’s Park that morning that was no mean feat. She could almost imagine that it had been someone else whose sedan chair had been knocked halfway down an embankment by a carriage; another she who, with clothes in disarray, had endured the embarrassment of being manhandled out of the wrecked chair, before being carried at the centre of a swarming crowd the length of the park and through Pall Mall to her own doorstep. Somehow, this mere youth had salved both body and mind, enabling her to stand off and be objective about the whole dreadful incident.
She watched his mirror image as he washed his hands in the dresser basin. His was not a new face; on the contrary, since her marriage he had often attended the household as his father’s assistant. The truth was that his arrival in place of Jeakes senior had displeased her at first. She had been affronted by the idea of being examined by some fumbling apprentice; a little worried too by the thought of her husband’s reaction to the situation. But she was bruised and aching and so worried about the child that out of sheer desperation she had submitted to his care.
Far from regretting the decision she realized now that John Jeakes’s indisposition had been somewhat fortunate. Though the father was much respected in his field, often servicing the needs of the king’s own physician, it seemed to her that his son showed still greater promise. There was more to it than merely soothing her body with ointments or tapping her stomach in time with the beating heart inside her womb. He had done all that and massaged the pain from her ricked neck; but medical competence alone could not explain her sense of well-being.
There was something striking about him, a certain fascination in the quiet self-confidence with which he had mastered the situation and her displeasure. There was allure in his touch, in the knowing depths of his hazel eyes. Given his head, François Jeakes had charisma, a natural gift for reviving the spirit as much as the body. Under the right patronage, she felt sure that one day he would make a great physician. Under her patronage, perhaps.
Rising from the chair, she walked past him to her writing bureau and took a sovereign from a top drawer.
‘This is too generous,’ he chided, unrolling his sleeves and slipping into his jacket.
She sighed then smiled serenely. ‘Hardly so, François, besides did you not say you would call on me again tomorrow? I shall send the coach for you.’
He shook his head pensively. ‘I will call with pleasure, Lady Eugenie. But with father so ill I can’t be bound to a set time. I will come by horse after noon.’
‘Please tell your father that Lord Herries and I wish him a swift recovery.’ On impulse, she reached to straighten the collar of his jacket. Meeting her gaze, François laid his hand over hers. He pulled it gently to his lips. Then he was gone.
Lady Eugenie returned to her seat by the window. When the carriage lamps had faded in the direction of St Martin’s Lane, she turned again to the mirror. The old spark was in her eyes. After years of stifling boredom, she felt again the spirit of her youth. And its resurrection was exciting.
She had found her cure-all.
And she had no intention of letting him go.
Portents
François wedged back the surgery door then opened a casement window to clear the sweat-reek his last patient had left behind. After a hectic morning spent diagnosing and bleeding, after patching up the results of the weekend’s drunken antics, he had at last found a lull. Beyond the dispensary door he could hear Anton’s muffled voice as he talked to a client. But for the moment at least, there was no one waiting for the surgery. Untying his apron, he wandered out into the hall, sat at the bottom of the stairs and rested his elbows on his knees. Autumn leaves gusted across the front porch flags and from upstairs drifted the less than perfect sound of Anna at the virginal.
